Decentralization of the Subnational Public Sector: An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants of Local Government Structure in Metropolitan Areas in the U. S.

Abstract

The conventional wisdom about the optimal organization or structure of local governments has undergone a dramatic change in the last twenty years. For a period after World War II, a movement existed in the U.S. and in many European countries that called for the consolidation of existing units of local governments into larger, general-purpose, jurisdictions [1; 12; 17; 19]. Such amalgamations, it was argued, would improve administrative efficiencies and equity in the delivery of locally-provided public services and allow for a greater degree of scale economies to be realized in the production of these services. These arguments persuaded legislators in several European countries-Sweden, Denmark, and West Germany are the most notable-to undertake substantial restructuring of their local governments. In each case, the restructuring was imposed on the local sector by the central government and involved the consolidation of municipalities [18, Ch. 12]. The most dramatic amalgamations occurred in Sweden where the number of municipalities declined from around 2,500 in 1950 to less than 300 at present. Unlike many European countries, comprehensive reorganization of local governments did not take place in the U.S. in the post World War II period.' Instead, the structure of local governments evolved slowly and in largely piecemeal fashion. As a result, a pattern of local governments has emerged in the U.S. that critics characterize as fragmented with a crazy-quilt of overlapping boundaries and with little in the way of coordination and cooperation among local authorities. In spite of the consolidationist arguments, the preponderance of research in the past three decades, beginning with Tiebout [32] and Stigler [31], has concluded that at least in some circumstances smaller jurisdictions (in terms of geographic size and in some instances in terms of scope of functional responsibilities) offer important advantages over larger jurisdictions.2 A large

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 91 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.